November 16, 2013

FOR 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.

That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.

It will miss yet another opportunity this year. ...

But once again, spectacle is likely to trump substance: not one word will be said at this event about what exactly the city was in 1963, when the president arrived in what he called, just moments before his death, “nut country.” ...

Those “men of Dallas” — men like my grandfather, oil men and corporate executives, self-made but self-segregated in a white-collar enclave in a decidedly blue-collar state — often loathed the federal government at least as much as, if not more than, they did the Soviet Union or Communist China. ...

For those men, Kennedy was a veritable enemy of the state, which is why a group of them would commission and circulate “Wanted for Treason” pamphlets before the president’s arrival and fund the presciently black-rimmed “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” advertisement that ran in The Dallas Morning News on the morning of Nov. 22. It’s no surprise that four separate confidants warned the president not to come to Dallas: an incident was well within the realm of imagination.

The wives of these men — socialites and homemakers, Junior Leaguers and ex-debutantes — were no different; in fact, they were possibly even more extreme.

(After all, there’s a reason Carol Burnett pulls a gun on Julie Andrews at the end of the famous “Big D” routine the two performed before the assassination in the early 1960s. “What are ya,” she screams, pulling the trigger, “some kinda nut?!”)

In the years before the second wave of the women’s movement, many of these women, affluent but frustrated in their exclusive neighborhoods like Preston Hollow and Highland Park, turned to politics as a means of garnering the validation they were otherwise denied. With time and money at their disposal, they would outdo their husbands, one another and even themselves. ...

And in the annals of my own family history, it was my charming grandmother, not some distant relation without a Neiman Marcus charge card, who nevertheless saw fit to found the “National Congress for Educational Excellence,” an organization that crusaded against such things as depictions of working women in Texas textbooks and the distribution of literature on homosexuality in Dallas public schools.

In a photograph taken not long after the assassination, my grandmother smiles a porcelain smile, poised and lovely in psychedelic purple Pucci, coiffure stacked high in what can only be described as a hairway to heaven. Her eyes, however, are intent, fixed on a target — liberalism, gender equality, gays.

Dallas is not, of course, “the city that killed Kennedy.” Nor does the city in which the president arrived 50 years ago bear much resemblance to Dallas today, the heart of a vibrant metroplex of 6.7 million people, most of whom have moved from elsewhere and have little or no connection to 1963.

But without question, these memories — and the remnants of the environment of extreme hatred the city’s elite actively cultivated before the president’s visit — have left an indelible mark on Dallas, the kind of mark that would never be left on Memphis or Los Angeles, which were stages rather than actors in the 1968 assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

For the last 50 years, a collective culpability has quietly propelled the city to outshine its troubled past without ever actually engaging with it. ...

But those are transient triumphs in the face of what has always been left unsaid, what the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald once called the “dark night of the soul,” on which the bright Texas sun has yet to rise. The far right of 1963 and the radicalism of my grandparents’ generation may have faded in recent years, they remain very much alive in Dallas. ...

This year Dallas has a chance to grapple with the painful legacy of 1963 in public and out loud. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen, although the city did quietly host a symposium on whether it really deserved to be labeled “the city of hate” earlier this month.

But when the national cameras start rolling on Nov. 22, Dealey Plaza, the abandoned, almost spectral site of the assassination and now of the commemoration, will have been retouched in a fresh coat of literal and figurative white paint. Cosmetics seem to be all we can expect.

I was under the impression that President Kennedy was assassinated by a Communist named Lee Harvey Oswald; evidently, I was misinformed. Instead, it must have been a giant right-wing conspiracy.

"Piereson's first original (and brilliant) insight is his recognition that what transformed American politics was not the assassination itself but how it was interpreted.

"Kennedy was slain by a devout communist, one-time defector to the Soviet Union, and admirer or Fidel Castro who had kept in touch with Soviet diplomats after returning home from the USSR and was trying to re-defect to Cuba. A common-sense interpretation of the crime would have portrayed Kennedy as an anti-communist martyr of the conservative cause in the Cold War. Such a view would have made the Cold War -- rather than civil rights -- the central issue in U.S. politics... But such an account would have also been contrary to the emerging "spirit of the age," which dictated to commentators a very different analysis.

"Before anyone knew the identity of Kennedy's assassin, his death was at once and widely attributed in media speculations to 'extremists' and 'bigots' on the Right. ... But that conviction hardly changed once it became known that the assassin was a communist. To be sure, the newspapers dug into Oswald's career as a defector very thoroughly. But the editorials and opinion columns, their television equivalents, and the comments of the liberal and cultural leaders repeatedly and passionately blamed the assassination on something called 'extremism,' which was disconnected from America in general and to the radical Right in particular. ... It soon became conventional wisdom that all Americans bore a share of the blame for the bigotry, intolerance, and hate that had struck down the president. John F. Kennedy in death became a martyr for the cause of civil rights -- a cause to which in life he had shown a prudent political coolness. ...

"Piereson's second great contribution is to establish that Mrs. Kennedy herself, in the very depths of her grief, was signally responsible for inventing and spreading this misinterpretation and lifting it to the level of myth.

... These questions were answered when Mrs. Kennedy learned that the lone Oswald had killed her husband. She then complained, "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist. It even robs his death of any meaning."

"Even before the misinterpretation had become current, she had intuitively grasped both its main features and the unfortunate fact that reality did not quite measure up to them. In her arrangements for the funeral and her selection of those speaking at the various memorial services, she ensured that the misinterpretation would be the dominant theme. Finally, by dictating to Theodore White the story that Kennedy had often ended his day listening to songs from his favorite musical, "Camelot," and by insisting that it must remain in White's article over the skepticism of his editors at Life magazine, she lifted the misinterpretation to the level of myth...

... "Observers attentive to purely political signs -- votes, laws, opinion polls -- were inevitably late to notice this cultural shift. But a woman of fashion, who was also politically knowledgeable, was able to sense it from the surrounding atmosphere. ...

"To their surprise, however, as the radicals [in the late 1960s] rushed forward with their battering rams, the liberals opened the gates and surrendered. How could they resist? If America had killed Kennedy, the liberalism was merely a smiley face painted on a System of racist and sexist oppression. ... For a decade or so after November 1963, liberalism and its institutions were convulsed by disputes, entering the maelstrom as pragmatic, patriotic, and problem-solving bodies, and emerging from it as perfectionist, utopian, anti-American ones, secretly anxious to punish the American majority for its sins rather than solve its problems."

I wonder, was it also Dallas' climate of hate that tried to assassinate the far-right Gen. Edwin Walker seven months before Kennedy was shot?

There's so much about McAuley's piece that is just loathsome: the sloppy history, the rhetorical crapping on his ancestors, the "come to terms" trope, which is the close cousin of the equally disingenuous leftist trope "having a conversation."

Liberal magical thinking at its finest. The recently published book "Dallas, 1963" by Minutaglio and Davis pushes the same ridiculous line as this article. And Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.

Put me in the camp of the conspiracy theorists. I don't think there is any question that what happened in 1963 was a coup d'etat. I think it bores people that take the Warren Commission Report to hear otherwise. There's not much to do about it now except that I will never believe anything I hear from the US government, I read Pravda, Russia Today and Al Jazeera and I think Snowden was a hero. Other than that, no big deal.

Did anyone here learn in high school or college that Oswald was a Communist, defected, and so on?

I sure didn't get that from Big Ed during the '90s and early 2000s.

Good thing Quantum Leap ran a two-part episode where Sam leaps into Lee Harvey Oswald's body. The first thing you see is him getting his picture taken by a Russian-speaking woman, later a scene where he's in the Soviet Union trying to defect, and so on.

Pop culture is better than schooling for stumbling upon forbidden knowledge. Not that it's everywhere in TV, movies, or music -- but at least it's not completely whitewashed like our cookie-cutter propaganda curricula.

(Sam didn't stop the Kennedy assassination, BTW. But Al tells him that the real purpose was to save Jackie Kennedy, who in an alternate history had been killed along with her husband that day.)

Imagine that: Dallas, that well-document pressure cooker of right wing hate, and it's a marginal, self-styled communist who assassinate's the president!It's the Narrate-O-Matic. Everything goes in something and comes out narrative gruel.

It's funny how liberals - ostensibly the tribunes of the common man - keep alive all that Camelot, american-royalty Kennedy crap. All those old home movies of the perfect family - Jack, Jackie, and the little jacklings. In reality, of course, Kennedy was a compulsive, reckless, doped-up poon-hound, and Jackie an ambitious social-climber who was willing to marry him in order to become first-lady. The presidency under Kennedy had never been so imperial - command performances! Marilyn Monroe regaling Kennedy with "Happy BJ" or whatever - and liberals just ate it up. They love that stuff. Oliver Stone even had Kevin Costner (as that sleezy, half-crazed New Orleans prosecutor, Jim Garrison) intone "do not forget your dead king" in his summation to the jury. Liberals - at heart - believe in autocracy. They long for a big-man to tell them what to do.

Those “men of Dallas” — men like my grandfather, oil men and corporate executives, self-made but self-segregated in a white-collar enclave in a decidedly blue-collar state — often loathed the federal government at least as much as, if not more than, they did the Soviet Union or Communist China. ...

With good reason. Those other governments were far away and not harming Texans.

In the years before the second wave of the women’s movement, many of these women, affluent but frustrated in their exclusive neighborhoods like Preston Hollow and Highland Park, turned to politics as a means of garnering the validation they were otherwise denied.

They had children, and they maintained a society. That's all those women want today, so I can't imagine that was insufficient in the years before the "second wave".

These things are important, and more to the point, they are important to those women. The notion that they were "frustrated" is ludicrous.

Do all these conspiracy theorists dispute that Oswald killed officer Tippit? There were apparently 12 witnesses. Or does Tippit not deserve a conspiracy?

People just don't want to believe what one man with a rifle can do. It doesn't seem like a total loser like Oswald should be able to single-handedly kill someone with the stature of Kennedy, but Oswald had the best shot at a moving target, with the target slowly rising in his sites, at a range that spanned from 177 to 265 feet. Hardly long distance shots.

I'll bet few conspiracy buffs would be willing to have those shots re-created with them in the car.

There's growing evidence that the Castro brothers encouraged and/or arranged the assassinations of John and later Ropbert Kennedy through the extremely efficient Cuban intelligence agency. But finally admitting this requires two admissions: (1) That the motivation of the Castros was the almost fanatical attempts of the Kennnedys to assasinate the Castros; and (2) that the Cubans ran and are reunning much better intelligence operations than the US. Madam Nhu was not only justified but providing a valuable insight when she characterized the first Kennedy assassination as "the chickens coming home to roost." There's a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting that Robert Kennedy thought the Cubans were somehow behind his brother's assassination and lived in expectation that he would suffer a similar fate at their hands.

The truly amazing thing about liberals' JFK worship is that his presidency accomplished almost nothing. No major legislation; just a treaty against atmospheric nuclear warhead testing. The rest of Kennedy's three years were entirely lackluster. JFK & Bobby even calibrated their moves in the Cuban Missile Crisis to play to JFK's domestic appeal for a 1964 reelection, more than to defuse the crisis - which was in any case a defensive win, and one that JFK only pulled off because he made sure his quid pro quo of pulling our missiles out of Turkey stayed on the Q.T. He also committed billions of our dollars to a show triumph in space, which was in large part a massive p.r. smokescreen for the U.S. military spy satellite programs.

And when you tell liberals that it was the old master philanderer Joe "Britain is Finished" Kennedy who bought and paid for every one of JFK's election wins, that JFK's rise was bought with patrician cold cash and were not actually sprung from genuine popular support, they go ballistic and insist that all that money handed out to the right power brokers doesn't mean anything because, they tell you - and here's where libs go all dewy-eyed: "But...JFK was a Man Of The People!"

This doesn't include all the "If JFK had lived" wet dreams that libs love to indulge, such as, "He'd have withdrawn our troops from Vietnam in 1963," and "He'd have been the greatest president for civil rights," and "He'd have done much more in his second term," and more such dream-on blather.

And when you tell liberals that it was the old master philanderer Joe "Britain is Finished" Kennedy who bought and paid for every one of JFK's election wins, that JFK's rise was bought with patrician cold cash and were not actually sprung from genuine popular support, they go ballistic

I don't know what liberals you talk to. Liberals in Massachusetts are very proud of what calculating operator the Kennedys were.

"A city full of right wingers and none of them had a hand in killing JFK, it's just so frustrating" should be the title of the piece or "I can't believe some American communist buffoon killed Kennedy, and I'm going to imply it was the fault of the right wing anyway" would be yet another.

The Nat'l Lampoon "JFK First 6000 Days" article isn't easy to find in a digital copy (most search engine queries leading to this blog) but this would seem like a great month for them to post it online. Yes, they actually have a (relatively spare) web site, which features a back issue PDF link at the home page but only for one sample, an earlier mag from 1970.

It seems that with control of the media, whoever they kill, whatever they do, they always win. They never get blamed for their murders, like Pim Fortuyn or the vast numbers murdered by the Black Panthers & other black racist terrorists in the 1970s.

Being able to construct the Narrative means never having to say you're sorry.

Re conspiracy - I recall an aide to Johnson recalling as soon as LBJ knew Oswald was a Communist, he assumed that Oswald had been acting under orders from the USSR. However, if that were publicly known it would likely initiate WW3. To avoid nuclear apocalypse he directed the Warren Commission to cover this up and to find that Oswald was a lone gunman.It turned out that Oswald actually was a lone gunman, but there was *also* an ex-post-facto conspiracy.

JFK inherited Eisehnhower America, the greatest civilisation in history. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! As a conservative I take 'not doing anything' as the best measure of success for most leaders, unless there are previous changes that need reversing.

LBJ then 'fixed' Eisenhower America - and broke it. The stats in The Bell Curve show this very clearly, Civil Rights hit and the social indicators that had been improving for everyone up until 1964 suddenly went into reverse.

Depending on whether you favor mafia- or CIA-centric theories of the assassination, the main plotting transpired in either Kansas City or New Orleans--not to mention points further south. Anyway, it's curious the author is rendering a national-level political event as more like an aw-shucks memoir vignette with a local hook--just your regular everyday Faulknerian mini-tragedy. Even if someone's going to accuse the local cops of "standing down," along with the Secret Service detail (some of whom were downtown getting very drunk the night before--plus ca change) why so specifically, geographically fixated with Dallas? The guy needs a psychiatrist

agnostic:"Good thing Quantum Leap ran a two-part episode where Sam leaps into Lee Harvey Oswald's body. The first thing you see is him getting his picture taken by a Russian-speaking woman, later a scene where he's in the Soviet Union trying to defect, and so on."

I remember when that episode aired in the UK, I read a TV review - the reviewer was puzzled and slightly annoyed that it didn't endorse a right-wing-conspiracy theory.

A few years later there were a couple UK investigative documentaries into the assassination, prompted I think by the Stone movie, which established pretty conclusively that Quantum Leap's then-controversial no-prior-conspiracy view had been exactly right (though there was a post-conspiracy by the White House to cover up assumed Soviet* involvement). I guess the US left-media are far too invested in the Oliver Stone view ever to accept that.

*LBJ: "They've won this one" - he decided he had to let the USSR 'get away with' killing Kennedy in order to avoid WW3.

Over the last 20 years I think the NYT has come to the conclusion that the real world is annoyingly contrary to what they'd like it to be, and therefore they will simply invent a set of facts that allow them to more easily make their arguments.

The FT for what its worth noted that while yes, indeed there were a few "Wanted for Treason" posters in Dallas to greet JFK, his reception was very enthusiastic with crowds cheering him wherever he went. And that Oswald no more represented Dallas than say, James Earl Ray represented Memphis.

Amazing, and coming from a fairly liberal but foreign paper.

After all, there were assassination attempts that failed against Andrew Jackson, Gerald Ford, George Wallace, and Ronald Reagan. Good luck, poor weapons, and good medical care account for that (Jackson's assailant used a cap and ball pistol that misfired on a misty morning). FDR escaped assassination too, with Mayor Cernak of Chicago getting killed. Truman narrowly escaped assassination by Puerto Ricans. And Teddy Roosevelt's giant speech folded up stopping the bullet meant to kill him. I count seven failed attempts to kill Presidents or Presidential candidates.

Then you have Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and JFK. Plus RFK and Martin Luther King (another political figure). That's four Presidential assassinations and two other political assassinations.

And yes, nearly all of them by loners and losers who are mentally ill. Only Truman's attack by the Puerto Rican independence terrorists fit the Hollywood bill, but no one in Hollywood would ever touch it.

JFK's assassination was entirely in line with historical American patterns. You could even argue that the sixty year period 1865-1925 was more violent than the Sixties with THREE sitting Presidents murdered, and another nearly killed.

I think this young man has some issues or quarrels with his family, which he then tries to project onto the city of Dallas, since he believes his family to have been somehow emblematic of the city.

However, he is insightful enough to realize that almost no one will care about his family issues, nor his issues with the city of Dallas. So he takes it one step further and tries to connect these personal grievances with the JFK assasination.

OK, we got it. You were a senstive young man raised in an atmosphere of hard-driving oil and financial executives and their Barbie-doll wives, and you resent the fact thet they dismissed your literary and intellectual ambitions. Sorry, but this doesn't connect up very well with a presidential assasination committed by an aggrieved,disenchanted dreamer who'd lived in, among other places -- including Dallas --Moscow and New York. In fact, the author's personality would seem to bear some degree of similarity to Oswald's. i.e. the sweeping and frenzied condemnation of people who happen not to see life his way.

LHO is not quite the opposite of a GWD, more like a cold-fish variant: the Great Lib Schmuck, always wrecking the narrative by having taken it seriously. At least Sacco & Vanzetti never got greedy. Note GLS are disproportionately commies (Reichstag fire, Pol Pot, any Green Party candidate)

it was my charming grandmother, who saw fit to found the “National Congress for Educational Excellence,” an organization that crusaded against such things as depictions of working women in Texas textbooks

That was then ...

I guess James McAuley is busy writing a scathing article, because this is now.

We don't have problems with the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was a shooter, but we do have problems with the idea that he was the lone gunman. There are four crucial points that, for us at least, make it extremely unlikely that Oswald was operating alone:

1. Oswald had a beautiful, unobstructed shot from the Texas Schoolbook Depository building in Dallas as the presidential motorcade approached. He passed on a perfect shot, choosing instead to allow the motorcade to turn left and proceed below his window, and then took a much more difficult shot with his view partially obscured by a tree. Why would he have done that if he were acting alone?

2. The idea that he took three shots with his bolt-action Italian rifle in the elapsed time (a few seconds) -- taking out Kennedy with the head shot -- is just outside the box of credibility. No matter how we strain, we can't get there.

3. The trajectory of the bullet that was supposed to have hit the president and Texas Gov. John Connolly similarly strains credibility.

4. The idea that Jack Ruby, a strip club owner and connected guy, went to the Dallas police station on an impulse and was so overwhelmed by uncontrollable rage at the death of his president that he shot Lee Harvey Oswald strains our credulity beyond its limits. Ruby was a lot of things, but sentimental was not one of them. Ruby looked out for Ruby. Whatever brought him to the station to kill Oswald was not uncontrolled emotion.

In Stratfor's view, the strength of the Warren Report is in the relative weakness of the alternative explanations. And many of these alternatives have overlooked Marina Oswald, who she was and what influence, if any, she had with her husband.

The only way to dismiss the Marina question is to make the following three assertions:

1. You have to believe that Marina, the attractive MVD princess, took one look at Oswald and said, "I've got to have that man."

2. You have to argue that obtaining permission in 10 days for an MVD colonel's live-in niece to marry an American defector was no big deal.

3. You have to argue that getting an exit permit from the Soviet Union for Marina in the space of six weeks in 1961 was no big deal.

It would get really interesting if one of them were to declare himself a Transexual:

Rutgers University football player claims he was bullied by coachBy Mike Jaccarino Published November 17, 2013 foxnews.com

A New Jersey family is calling for an investigation of a Rutgers University football coach over an alleged bullying incident in which the coach berated a scholarship player during a study hall and threatened to head-butt him.

NJ.com reports Mark and Clarice Tyree say Rutgers Defensive Coordinator Dave Cohen established a pattern of verbally abusing their son, Jevon Tyree – a defensive back – during practices and team functions before their relationship escalated into threats of violence during a study hall in the spring.

During the 1960 presidential campaign, it was a well-heeled mob of Junior League women who heckled and spat on Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson outside the storied Adolphus Hotel downtown (a scandal that actually helped Johnson politically by showing the distance between the Texas senator and his more ardent constituents).

Considering whjat a psycho LBJ was, it's hard to get disturbed about a little heckling incident.

In October 1963, just weeks before the president’s visit, it was the wife of a downtown insurance executive, not a derelict, who struck Adlai E. Stevenson, then the United Nations ambassador, over the head with a picket sign.

It doesn't seem like a total loser like Oswald should be able to single-handedly kill someone with the stature of Kennedy...

Back in those days of almost ubiquitous high-paying blue collar jobs,LHO(who, oddly enough,had the same tested IQ as JFK) was a loser only by Harvard standards. I know a guy from that era who was discouraged from studying engineering since he couLd make almost as much an aircraft mechanic. But what is meant by "loser" in LHO's case is probably that he allegedly had mental aberrations almost as severe as those of LBJ's.

Auntie Analogue:No major legislation; just a treaty against atmospheric nuclear warhead testing.

You left out the Reaganesque tax cuts!!!

Auntie Analogue:He also committed billions of our dollars to a show triumph in space, which was in large part a massive p.r. smokescreen for the U.S. military spy satellite programs.

Uhh, this is a Paleocon board - led by a dude whose father worked on DOD aerospace programs - we're down with all that.

I'm telling you, though, c'mon over to The Chateau, and we'll hold your hand and comfort you and serve you a nice warm mug of pumpkin-flavored holiday cider while together we work our way through all of your darkest, most disturbing & unsettling fantasies about missile-istic phallocentrism.

Police have yet to connect all the incidents, but released surveillance video that shows one group attacking a Jewish man. The video shows from a few different angles the victim, a man in a hooded jacket, getting punched.

One man who didn’t want to be identified told Slattery his 12-year-old son was attacked in the same way.

“It’s clearly anti-Semitism,” the man said.

[...]

He said the victims are being attacked because they are Jews.

Behrman said he believes the assaults are part of a disturbing game by some African-American teens.

“And they’re playing a game: ‘knockout.’ ‘Knock out the Jew,’ maybe. And they’re going around the neighborhood punching Jews,” Behrman said.

[...]

The attacks and vandalism are being investigated by the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force.

I was actually surprised to see how starkly the MSM's coverage contrasted with how they cover these incidents when mere white "gentiles" are attacked. They gave the race of the perp in the Brooklyn story, which they almost never do when the victims are white "gentiles." They portrayed the crime as part of a pattern of black on non-black hate crime, which they do not when the victims are white "gentiles." There was no "this has nothing to do with race" crapola from the cops, which there always is when the article states the perp was black and the victim was a white "gentile." And the motive was given as racial/ethnic bigotry, which it never is when the perp is black and the victim is a white "gentile."

No race, no bigotry. You have to read the comments for that. Speaking of comments, the Brooklyn story got a LOT of comments. The majority were from WN types and race realists. I noticed yesterday that the comment feature, and all the comments, were removed. As I wrote there, many times, CBS'/MSM's apparent racial hierarchy:

maybe the conspiracy theories are a conspiracy to tag the RIGHT culprits.Iv often thought if they are hiding something at langley its proof the soviets put the hit on proof at the time that would have led to Armegedden

If the official story is true, then it proves that the conspiracy mongering had its roots in the left wing trying to distract us from the fact that JFK's assassin was one of their extremists.

Auntie Analogue wrote:

This doesn't include all the "If JFK had lived" wet dreams that libs love to indulge, such as, "He'd have withdrawn our troops from Vietnam in 1963," and "He'd have been the greatest president for civil rights," and "He'd have done much more in his second term," and more such dream-on blather.

Except for Vietnam, all those things did happen under LBJ. LBJ just applied political skill and muscle to JFK's agenda. JFK being assassinated was the best thing that ever happened to the liberal agenda.

Re the OP article, there needs to be a name for this stuff. How about "Mason-Dixophobia": an irrational hatred of what lies south of the Mason-Dixon line? Of course the Hate is more generalised than that, these days.

I have read this kind of crap about the Kennedy assassination for most of my adult life. Let me tell you a couple things you won't hear on TV or read about.

First of all Kennedy died because Oswald was not as stupid as most assassins. The average President has had about one or two assassination attempts. Gerald Ford for example, had two women try to shoot him. Reagan had one young man. I think Nixon is the only one recently who was assassination attempt free.

Almost all Presidential assassins have used a pistol. Most missed and those who did manage to hit him like Hinckley, didn't kill him. Pistols aren't all that deadly. But Oswald used a rifle.

Every nation on earth trains it's young men to kill. But they do not issue their troops pistols. Every single man in my regiment qualified with the M-1 Garand. Me too. Any fool can shoot and hit someone with a rifle.

The strange fact about the Kennedy assassination is not that he was killed but that only he was killed. You would think that we would have lost at least a couple more.

Second - Oswald was a typical mainstream leftist. I knew lots of guys like him when I was a teenager. I picketed the White House around 1961 with 'Fair Paly for Cuba'. No one picketed the White House in those days except fringe groups made up of loony radicals like Oswald and me.

Finally I'm not impressed with all the strange revelations of the conspiracy theorists. All sorts of strange coincidence's happen all the time but they go generally unnoticed.

For example, all of my closest friends from college were investigate by the FBI about their relationship to the assassination. It seems that while I was away in Texas in the Army a fellow I never met drifted into my circle of friends. He had written a book about the most remarkable person he had ever met. He had written a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald.

The book was unpublished and I never saw a copy of the manuscript but many of my friends were grilled by the FBI about that book and its author.

True story. It was, as it happens, just a coincidence. I expect that there are still many unexplained coincidences like this for those who are interested in such things.

For example. why all the focus on the Mafia and the CIA. Kennedy was most controversial for being a Catholic. Wasn't Oswald a Protestant? Where exactly was Archbishop of Canterbury that afternoon?

Kennedy assassination theorizing is fun and easy. It should be a party game.

For the last 50 years, a collective culpability has quietly propelled the city to outshine its troubled past without ever actually engaging with it.

Say what? Please, explain to me how "collective culpability" can be the, or even a, causal factor behind the creation of shiny contemporary Dallas. In spite of the dishonest disengage-iness of the outshiners. (I don't know what the hell that means, either, but one thing at a time.) TIA

Oh, here we go:

To be fair, pretending to forget has helped Dallas achieve some remarkable accomplishments in those years, like the completion of the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, the development of the astonishingly successful Cowboys franchise and the creation of what remains one of the country’s most electric local economies.

I'm sorry, that didn't help at all. I'm a bit a slow. How exactly does "pretending to forget" build airports, football franchises, and rockin' local economies?

But those are transient triumphs in the face of what has always been left unsaid, what the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald once called the “dark night of the soul,” on which the bright Texas sun has yet to rise.

I'm sensing a real Bulwer-Lytton prize contender here...

James McAuley is a Marshall scholar studying history at the University of Oxford.

God have mercy on us all. This mawkish crap wouldn't have made it past my 5th grade grammar teacher, let alone a high school history teacher marking down for lack of logic or factual support for assertions.

(Savor the bit about a photo McAuley's grandmother circa '63: the laser rays of homophobia shooting from her eyes in what I'm sure the guilty witch thought was a harmless unrevealing little snapshot! Hah, your Pucci dress and all your porcelain poise can't save you from fiery judgment, grandma!)

But James McAuley is a Marshall scholar studying history at the University of Oxford.

I suspect that as 11/22 approaches, we'll hear from some leftoids that GOP opposition to Obama is no different than a wish to see him assassinated, figuratively speaking. If Obama were to die unexpectedly, you can practically hear people like Chris Matthews claiming it was because of GOP "hate," and otherwise drawing comparisons to the Kennedy assassination.

I went through an early adolescent phase of being fascinated by JFK, and I read all the books about him/Camelot I could get my hands on. I definitely absorbed the "Dallas was a city of hate" vibe. Of course, growing up "inside the beltway" didn't help matters.

Add 35-40 years, a number of years overseas, and general maturity, and I realize what a massive con job it all was. Now I live in suburban community north of Dallas, and I've gone to the infamous grassy knoll exactly once in 20 years, with some visiting family about 10 years ago. I'll take a pass on the current maudlin fest, thank you very much.

The sad thing is that Lee Harvey Oswald was one of the most influential people of the 20th century. Not from what he stopped Kennedy from doing, but how he enabled radical liberals to make Kennedy a martyr.

Oswald was the anti-Dallas (or more likely just a clueless wife-beater who had married above himself, hated the fact that his intelligent wife had a little newspaper-clipping shrine to Kennedy, and was just desperate to be a big somebody). The Walker assassination attempt shows he was far, far from right-wing:

Lee Harvey really was a commie symp, although as mixed-up as he was one has to wonder if it really meant much to him, other than as a way to play Mr. Big. But then that might be typical of many revolutionaries:

Kennedy was killed by an insecure nut-job communist sympathizer. Perhaps among other reasons, jealous of the fact that his wife was a big Kennedy fan. The liberal echosphere, movies, etc., don't seem to show that side of things so much.

Good thing Dallas is increasingly "vibrant" now. Hopefully the Original Sin of being a city full of white, middle-American conservatives can be ethnically and ideologically cleansed once and for all. The NYT will magnanimously forgive Texas...once Texans are crushed.

Seriously, this guy is a total jerk. Scoring moral points by accusing your grandparents of a crime they simply did not commit is repulsive.

I've been trying to come up with a pithy phrase to describe the social dynamic you find in the comment section of a place like The Atlantic or the NYT -- a bunch of overeducated white liberals stumbling over one another to diss their own, fellate The Other, smoke out even the slightest ideological deviation, etc. You know what I mean.

"I've been trying to come up with a pithy phrase to describe the social dynamic you find in the comment section of a place like The Atlantic or the NYT"

It's really nothing more than simple elitism. The same exact thing happens on the NPR website.

I'm sensing a large amount of dismay among the left. I think the nonexistent reaction to the Zimmerman verdict really hurt them. They were hoping and praying for riots and killings, and what they got barely qualified as a ruckus.

on this one, you are completely and hopelessy WRONG. Oswald did not shoot anyone; not President Kennedy, not General Walker, and not even Police Officer J.D. Tippit.

No credible evidence, and I MEAN NONE, can tie Oswald to any of those shootings. None of your other commentators know anything. (NOVA computerized re-creations are evidence? What a joke!)

Don't take my word for it - J. Edgar Hoover admitted it on tape the night after JFK was killed - "the evidence against this fellow (Oswald) is not very strong". 24 hours later, Hoover said the case was "airtight"

What changed? Nothing, except now Oswald was dead, there would be no legal proceeding, and as a dead man, he could now take the blame for everything!

Who was Oswald? A creation of the CIA. The perfect patsy.

The city of Dallas is not responsible , nor the Russians, nor the Cubans, nor the Mob, nor right-wingers, nor oil-men, not the "climate of hate". . .

No one man could have done all the damage in Dealey Plaza. Again, don't take my word for it - LBJ and Warren Commissioner Richard Russell said that explicity on tape. They didn't believe it . Nor do I.Nor should you.

You're too smart. Stop missing on the greatest political murder/cover-up of all time. Stop hiding behind tasteless 36-year ofd parodies. Stop buying the mainstream version and actually read the evidence for yourself. The evidence the WC had available to it, limited as it was, was more than enough to prove conspiracy.

Only intellectual cowards would refuse to examine the evidence. And I don't think you are a coward.

Nobody wants to believe the JFK assassination was essentially just the equivalent of a jealous "Saturday night" shooting.

Somehow it must not fit with our pre-civilization cognitive models, where only an alpha male, or his clique, can take out the top alpha and his posse.

How much difference a mediocre Italian rifle makes. (Though those rifles appear to have made up about a tenth of the rifles used in the fighting in Libya in 2011, so mediocre is relative...) For the record (look at the simple stuff, like the pistol, not the rifle):

Anonymous 4:27 pm is exactly what I meant when I wrote that NONE of your commentators know anything.

Just to take the first two witnesses to the J.D. Tippit shooting he cited, Helen Markham and Domingo Benevides:

Here is the verbatim transcript from the Warren Commission hearings for Helen Markham as to who she identified in a police line-up on Friday. The WC attorney, Joseph Ball, is trying to get her to say the guy in the line-up was Tippit's killer:

Ball: Now, when you went into the room you looked these people over, these four men?

Markham: Yes, sir.

Ball:Did you recognize anyone in the line-up?

Markham: No, sir.

Ball: You did not? Did you see anybody - I have asked you that question before - did you recognize anybody from their face?

Markham: From their face, no.

Ball: Did you identify anybody in these four people?

Markham: I didn't know nobody . . .I had never seen none of them, none of these men.

Ball: No one of these men?

Markham: No one of them.

Ball: No one of them?

Markham: No, sir.

Ball: Was there a number two man in there?

Markham: Number two is the one I picked. Number two is the one I saw shoot the policeman. I looked at him. When I saw this man, I WASN'T SURE, but I had cold chills run all over me . . .

Reading these repeated, leading, improper questions of a befuddled witness by an experienced attorney would have been tossed in any court proceeding had Oswald actually lived to see a trial. He did not live. He was murdered in the arms of the police less than 48 hours after the President was murdered.

Nonetheless, the WC said Markham's testimony had "probative" value.

For the rest of us, realizing that the entired WC case rests on such crappy evidence gives the rest of "cold chills".

Domingo Benevides TOLD THE DPD THAT HE COULD NOT IDENTIFY OSWALD AS TIPPIT'S KILLER. When he testified before the Warren Commission, he told the Commission he COULD NOT IDENTIFY OSWALD - even after Oswald's picture (which was world-famous by that point) was shown to him in court! The WC did not use him in their argument! How, then, can the Anonymous 4:27 above write anything unless he is completely ignorant?

To re-cap. The comment at 4:27 was completely and hopelessly wrong!

I could go on and destroy anyone's argument that Oswald shot anyone. Even you, Steve. I like what you have to write. But if you persist in spreading the lone-nut baloney, I will take you on. Anytime, anywhere. I will wreck you. Don't ruin your reputation with your faithful readers, including me, and lose a public debate on the assassination because you backed the wrong side.

Can anyone find an authoritative source for the NYT prose-style parody that was circulated in the 1980s?:

DALLAS, Nov. 22—Elvira Brown's aging face seems almost to be a map of the parched, weatherbeaten Texas countryside that has been her home for 83 years. Through the eyes that squint in the harsh sunlight, she has seen Dallas grow from a tiny cowtown into a midland capital. The street outside of her tiny house used to be nothing more than a dust trail in summer and a mudhole in winter.

Years ago, she would sit on this porch and watch cattle drives pass. Today, a procession of quite a different sort passed along the now-paved course. It was a motorcade. It flew by at top speed on its way to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Top speed, because, it seems, the President of the United States was inside. And he was dead.

My father graduated from the NYC Police Academy in 1961 and Kennedy was a guest at the graduation. My father has a photo of Kennedy in a bubble car! I looked up the story in the NY Times archive and they seemed to think the fact that a woman was valedictorian was a bigger deal. So, the President goes to a police event in a bubble car, and then goes to Dallas in a convertible, strange no?

Not right. Not left. Joint effort. "Me and Lee", by Judyth Vary Baker, fills in the New Orleans deatails. 60 Minutes spent more time investigating her story than any other, and I don't think it was just caution that kept them from airing it. The series The Men Who Killed Kennedy, featured her story in 2003. The History Channel was threatend and has not aired it since, though the whole thing is on YouTube. Hardly know where to begin, except that I know blogs like this are monitored by persons paid to promote the government line (for lack of a better term.)Stone was right, a coup d'etat occurred 11/22/63, and the ideological and even biological descendants are still in power. Every president since has been a puppet who would not dare to have the Treasury Dept. print money, without involvement of the Federal Reserve (as JFK did shortly before his death; just one more nail in his coffin). In fact, the massive amount of literature by impeccable sources is so overwhelming that I can only assume the commenters here who parrot the government line: LHO Alone Gunman, are either, a: totally ignorant of the research, and uninterested anyway; or, b: paid trolls.

Reading some of these comments is like reading that electricity and telephones and batteries were invented by George Washington Carver's relatives, because the President says so. You all believe that and not some crazy conspiracy about Tesla, Edison, and JP Morgan.

I don't know if things would have been any better if JFK had lived. Probably not. But I do believe he was one of the very few world class politician who was not a total psycho. He had an expression sometimes that seemed to indicate he was shocked--shocked--at what he realized he was dealing with. He may have been over-sexed, but he kept Dr. Strangelove/Lemznitzer from carrying out Northwoods (google that), and actually wept at the thought of being the cause of WWIII. Why do they say he was unemotional? I can't imagine sincere tears from any other pol except maybe -- big maybe -- Reagan. btw, JFK banned Henry Kissinger from the WH, calling him "insane." That alone is cause for glory.

I have always been amazed how little attention Oswald's Soviet connections get. I think I was in my late teens before I even saw this mentioned anywhere. A former defector to the USSR with a Soviet wife kills Kennedy? That seems a pretty obvious explanation in retrospect, especially given the amazing number of other assasinations the Soviets carried out between the 1920s and 1960s. The US seems to have suffered a collective blindness on both the right and left. Any explanation other than the obvious one - the Soviets killed Kennedy - will do.

Stone was right, a coup d'etat occurred 11/22/63, and the ideological and even biological descendants are still in power. Every president since has been a puppet who would not dare to have the Treasury Dept. print money, without involvement of the Federal Reserve (as JFK did shortly before his death; just one more nail in his coffin)."

This is commonly trotted out by people on the right as a reason why Kennedy was assassinated - because he sought to remove the authority of the Federal Reserve to issue currency. The problem with the idea is that it is wrong. In 1963, Kennedy signed the bill that eliminated silver certificates. The fact that he later issued an executive order directing the Treasury to issue them is misunderstood - it was only a temporary administrative provision in force until such time as the law that HE signed took effect. Silver backed currency was eliminated with Kennedy's agreement.

Cause everyone back then was obsessed with the same crap hipsters are now (after a few more months or years of 'world war T' presumably he'd have to mention how much she hated them too). Interesting he didn't mention 'white supremacy' though. Though naturally it was mentioned that his family was something in high society, if only locally.

Is it just me or is there something especially evil about holding one's own ancestors out to the public as objects of scorn and ridicule.

This is a property of the media--once the narrative is established for a story, mere hard evidence that it's completely wrong is not enough to shift it. The Zimmerman story was a beautiful illustration of this phenomenon.

More than the Kennedy killing, it was the killing of Oswald that messed it all up.

If he had lived, I think it would have been incontestable that he done it.

To be sure, Oswald complicated matters by leaving his scent and fingerprints all over the place: with communist groups, defection to the USSR, with far-right groups, with underworld figures, with Soviet embassy in Mexico, etc.

I think he saw himself as an important agent in history rubbing shoulders with everyone and snooping and betraying everyone.

But in fact, no one paid any attention to him and saw him as some kid looking for attention. When he was ignored and given the cold shoulder and wasn't given any respect, he took things into his own hands to prove that he could change history.

Ironically, the key to Oswald's psychology is in the Ron Kovic character in BORN ON THE 4TH. Ron sees himself as a hero, a warrior, a white knight against communism, the great patriot, etc. But it's all in his head. On the night before he ships out, no one is cheering or honoring him. He feels all alone and he runs off to the prom to dance with a girl. Such discrepancy between his sense of himself and how the world sees him.

There's a character like that in MEAN STREETS too. A young would-be hood kills someone(David Carradine in the washroom) to be recognized as a man of honor. He did it in the name of the mafia boss who was supposedly insulted by the Carradine character, but the mafia boss never ordered the hit and is upset with the whole business.

http://youtu.be/BS-6KavRfww

It could be both Oswald and Ruby acted on their own to prove something to the world that really didn't care about them.

To be sure, I suspect maybe Ruby was ordered to kill Oswald by the mob because the mob feared that Oswald might say crazy thing about it. BTW, wasn't Ruby Jewish? When will the Jewish community(and maybe Jewish hoods) take responsibility for messing up the case?

"A former defector to the USSR with a Soviet wife kills Kennedy? That seems a pretty obvious explanation in retrospect, especially given the amazing number of other assasinations the Soviets carried out between the 1920s and 1960s."

I think Oswald would have felt honored if the Soviets chose him for such a mission.

But the Russians just saw him as a blowhard, nuisance, and pest. They were glad to get rid of him. Oswald later contacted other groups, leftwing ones to serve/join/lead and rightwing ones to infiltrate and subvert. But he got the same treatment from all of them. A cold shoulder that said, 'get lost, you loser, we have no use for you'.

Oswald belongs to the list of loser killers who finally pulled the trigger to prove their worth. In that sense, he isn't much different from Adam Lanza.

Or take the Fords in THE LONG RIDERS. Given the cold shoulder by the James gang but finally, 'I shot Jesse James.' ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES is one of the best films on the loser killer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aErChTKF6u4

There is such a character in WILD BILL and BULLETPROOF HEAT(AKA KILLER).

‘For those men, Kennedy was a veritable enemy of the state, which is why a group of them would commission and circulate “Wanted for Treason” pamphlets before the president’s arrival and fund the presciently black-rimmed “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” advertisement that ran in The Dallas Morning News on the morning of Nov. 22.’

Of course, the guy who placed that advert was a Bernard Weissman, but that would mess up The Narrative, so his Wasp grandmother needs to be denounced instead.

Not right. Not left. Joint effort. "Me and Lee", by Judyth Vary Baker, fills in the New Orleans deatails."

About ten years ago, I saw a TV special on the Kennedy assassination which was largely built around the claims of Judith Baker. She was quite plainly a delusional nut. This same show also featured a woman, a young girl living in Texas at the time, who claimed that her father was one of the assassins because he was out late that night and came home in a state of nervousness. That was it. Case closed, I guess. It was all ridiculous hokum.

It´s not as much Kennedy´s but rather Oswald´s murder that seems very suspect. Unless both the USSR and the CIA wanted him dead, to prevent an escalation and conceal their implication. Yes, one part of the government, say the CIA or whatever, could´ve acted without consent from the whole government, and work in collusion with the KGB and/or the Mafia. I now believe Oswald did it, thinking it was a KGB contract, while actually it was a sub-contract. The CIA turned to the KGG for help, and these provided Oswald who was not only a good shot but also an easily dispensable nitwit. The motive: we´ll never know. Kennedy must have rubbed the wrong people off: the mafia, the Fed, the CIA or some other branch of Government...

Denouncing one's family to the authorities was encouraged by Soviet Russia -- and of course other totalitarian regimes throughout history.

Question: is the author of this piece consciously emulating Pavlik Morozov? Or is he aping Obama, who famously threw his own grandmother under the bus (but at least did not heap ridicule on her hairstyle)?

"1. Oswald had a beautiful, unobstructed shot from the Texas Schoolbook Depository building in Dallas as the presidential motorcade approached. He passed on a perfect shot, choosing instead to allow the motorcade to turn left and proceed below his window, and then took a much more difficult shot with his view partially obscured by a tree. Why would he have done that if he were acting alone?"

Maybe because he just didn't realize it? Nobody has ever accused Oswald of being a genius.

"2. The idea that he took three shots with his bolt-action Italian rifle in the elapsed time (a few seconds) -- taking out Kennedy with the head shot -- is just outside the box of credibility."

Pfft, it's easy. I have a Carcano carbine - same action, shorter barrel - and I could make those shots easily even with iron sights, much less a scope. With a little practice anyone could fire a bolt-action rifle that quickly.

"3. The trajectory of the bullet that was supposed to have hit the president and Texas Gov. John Connolly similarly strains credibility."

Actually the ONLY trajectory that makes any sense for the second bullet goes through Kennedy's neck and hits Connolly.

"1. You have to believe that Marina, the attractive MVD princess, took one look at Oswald and said, "I've got to have that man.""

"That man" was an American. That alone would have been enough for Marina to spread for him. Besides, she was immature, and a little squirrely. She wouldn't have been the first woman to marry on a whim and later regret it.

You have GOT to do better than just regurgitating old conspiracy nonsense. Face it, the Warren Commission got it RIGHT.

Look. Suppose I wanna kill a famous or powerful people. Suppose I rub shoulders with leftwing groups, rightwing groups, visit embassies, and seek out all sorts of contacts. Even if nothing came of those incidents, after I carry out the killing, people are gonna start connecting the dots.

Oswald was a loser. No one paid him any attention. In a way, he killed Kennedy not because he was ordered by leftwing and rightwing forces. It was because he was ignored by all of them. They told him to get lost, and he wanted to prove to the world--and to himself--that he alone had the guts to do something big. He was like the loser guy in LOOPER with the big gun who has to prove that he can do it.

If some political group had actually hired Oswald and valued him, he would likely have been just another radical hack spouting opinions. But they all ignored him, and so, he went off to make trouble. True, there was a violent streak in him, and it'd always been there. But what really drove him over the edge was that no one cared for his commitment and 'dangerousness'. They all saw him and thought, 'a loser'. It's like the scene in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA where some guy dismisses Benny as a 'loser'. And Benny says, 'no one loses all the time'.

If Hitler had made it to art school, he would have been a painter. If Oswald had been respected by radical groups, he would have been a professional agitator or pundit. But he was rebuffed by all. So, he created his own narrative, as Travis Bickle did in TAXI DRIVER.

If some political group had actually hired Oswald and valued him, he would likely have been just another radical hack spouting opinions.

The only radical political group of any significance in 1963 was the loser FBI-controlled CPUSA. That changed in just two years-and it's hard to argue that LHO didn't play a big role in bringing about that change.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

My Book:

"Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency." - John Derbyshire Author, "Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics" Click on the image above to buy my book, a reader's guide to the new President's autobiography.